Yale scientist tapped to serve key roles at the White House and NSF

By Karen N. Peart

March 6, 2012

Yale scientist and Haskins Laboratories chief executive officer Philip Rubin has been appointed to key roles at the White House and the National Science Foundation.

Rubin has been named assistant director for social, behavioral, and economic sciences in the Executive Office of the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). He will also serve as a senior advisor in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) directorate.

At OSTP, Rubin will focus primarily on a range of executive branch activities in the social, behavioral, and neurological sciences. He will have leadership responsibilities in an interagency initiative that will identify policy options for improving clinical treatments for brain injuries; applying new insights into cognition and learning to the domains of education and learning; and accelerating the development of therapies for neurological diseases.

“Over the years Dr. Philip Rubin has provided outstanding leadership and vision at Haskins Laboratories,” said Haskins Laboratories president and director of research Kenneth Pugh. “He is a dear friend and a mentor to me and others, and I am confident that he will do extraordinary things in his important new roles at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation.”

In addition to his role at Haskins Laboratories, which is affiliated with Yale University, Rubin serves as an adjunct professor in the Department of Surgery, Otolaryngology, in the Yale University School of Medicine, and is a research affiliate in the Department of Psychology at Yale. Rubin is the former Chair of the National Academies/National Research Council (NRC) Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences, which focuses on the intersection of cognitive science and public policy.

He was the chair of the NRC Committee on Field Evaluation of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences-Based Methods and Tools for Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, and a member of the NRC Committee on Developing Metrics for Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Research. He was also a member of the Executive Committee of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences. From 2000 through 2003 Rubin served as the director of the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences at the NSF.

Rubin is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Acoustical Society of America, the American Psychological Association (APA), the Association for Psychological Science, an elected member of the Psychonomic Society and Sigma Xi, and a member of a number of other professional societies. In 2010 Rubin received APA’s Meritorious Research Service Commendation. He is married to Joette Katz, Connecticut’s Commissioner of the Department of Children and Families. Rubin and Katz serve as fellows at Yale’s Trumbull College.